


Mating Can Be In-Tents

by Carrieosity



Series: Choices 'Verse [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alpha Castiel (Supernatural), Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Camping, Established Relationship, Family Bonding, Fluff and Humor, Gender Roles, Hiking, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Miscommunication, Misunderstandings, Nature, Omega Dean Winchester, Protective Castiel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrieosity/pseuds/Carrieosity
Summary: In an effort to get to know the newest member of their family, Castiel's brother and his wife insist that a camping trip is definitely in order: away from civilizations, away from distractions, away from everything. It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.It's amazing how one tiny act of carelessness can turn everything on its head, turning a weekend of fun into a nightmare.
Relationships: Amelia Novak/Jimmy Novak, Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Choices 'Verse [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/787635
Comments: 63
Kudos: 419
Collections: SPN ABO Bingo Round 4





	1. Courting Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> (I am so, sorry about the title.)
> 
> This is for the SPN ABO Bingo. I'd been considering writing something along these lines for a while, and it only took a little tweaking to make each chapter fit a square. It's all planned, and I've got much of it written. Jeez, it's been a while since I posted something serially, though!
> 
> Square One: Courting

Faint traces of slightly burned baking spices wafted on the air, reaching Dean’s nose as he came through the front door. His lips quirked wryly, knowing full well that what he was smelling had nothing to do with anything actually in the kitchen. Whatever was frustrating his mate was irritating him enough to overpower the takeout Dean had brought home with him, and he dropped the bags on the counter before heading off in search of the muttering he could hear coming from the bedroom.

“God dammit, Jimmy, I swear…” Castiel’s grumbling became more intelligible when Dean poked his head into their shared closet. He grinned at the sight of Castiel’s legs dangling from the attic hatch, about a foot above the top of the stepstool he’d used to reach it. Feet kicked as their owner strained harder to reach whatever object was proving to be stubbornly elusive.

“If you get eaten by the attic, I promise to have a closed-casket for whatever parts of you I can salvage,” Dean called upward, leaning against the doorframe to watch. “Not that it’s not a nice view, I mean.”

After a startled jerk of his legs at being caught off-guard, Castiel huffed a dry laugh. “Your consideration for decorum is noted,” he said, easing his way cautiously out of the hole in the ceiling. His feet searched blindly for the top of the ladder, and Dean quickly reached to grab them and guide them to the step. “Thank you,” Castiel sighed as he emerged, dragging a cardboard box along with him.

“That for the camping trip, I take it?” Dean asked curiously. He took the hefty box from Castiel, sneezing twice in succession as a cloud of dust drifted up from it. At least the burning smell eased up a bit, as Castiel’s good humor began to return and he chuckled at whatever face Dean was making.

“I’m hoping so, at any rate. Jimmy was the last one to use my gear, for a work retreat a while back, and I haven’t checked the box since then. He put it back up there himself when he got back, apparently by tossing it like he was making a free throw.”

“He does have his own stuff now, though, right?” Not wanting to put the dusty box onto the clean bed covers, Dean dropped it on the rug before settling onto his knees to open it and rummage through the contents. “We’re not going to have to share a tent with two more adults and a pup?”

“I’d sooner build us a shelter out of branches and leaves with my own bare hands,” Castiel said as he joined Dean on the floor. “But no, Amelia’s a die-hard camper, and she’s more than equipped to spend an entire season roughing it, let alone a long weekend like this one.”

Dean nodded. “So I take it she’s the one driving this whole thing?” Jimmy and Amelia had been thrilled when he and Castiel had announced their mating, but the initial excitement had been quickly replaced by dismay at the acknowledgment that the entire thing had happened without fanfare or even a lick of the usual traditional courtship nonsense (to use the phrasing Castiel had employed in their defense).

“I never talked to your brother about my ‘intentions,’” Castiel said, rolling his eyes. “We never had any combined gatherings, letting your family get to know mine ahead of our mating.”

“I met Claire,” Dean said with a shrug and a wink. “She approved of me.”

“Oddly enough, a preschooler’s vote of confidence doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight, no matter how precocious the child,” Castiel replied. Pulling tent poles from the box and laying them out in methodical fashion, he added, “Also, she still thinks you’re a Disney prince. Of course she approves.”

“Aw, but, Cas, you were my new dream,” Dean sighed, batting his eyelashes before cracking up in laughter. Castiel flattened his lips in an attempt to look unamused, but the edges of his mouth quivered with the effort to hold back his own mirth.

“Anyway, it’s not as though there’s much point to it now, or that I ever had the slightest inclination toward letting my family have a vote on who I chose to share my life with, but, well…” Grimacing, Castiel unzipped a first aid kit to peer inside critically, then tossed it to the side. “Going along with this now will let them feel satisfied, with a minimum of effort on our part. It’s just a camping trip, away from distractions so they can get to know you better as my mate. You don’t mind too much, do you?”

Truthfully, Dean was more than a little uncomfortable about an intensive “get to know the in-laws” trip with no possibility of escape in the event that things got weird, but he wasn’t going to let Castiel know how reluctant he felt. No matter how many times Castiel swore that he’d never wanted a primly submissive omega to keep his house and obediently bear him litters of fat pups, Dean couldn’t help thinking that he should at least try to make things easier for the guy when it came to dealing with an extended family that might have had different ideas about what an appropriate partner looked like.

“Hey, I like camping,” he said, dodging the meaning behind Castiel’s question. “Just so long as you remember, when we’re putting up the tent, how you were the one to call it ‘minimal effort.’” The look Castiel gave him said clearly that he knew Dean was using humor as a cover, but, mercifully, he didn’t push.

“How about we leave this here, go eat dinner, and deal with the rest of it later? Frankly, I’m having trouble concentrating on anything other than the smell of grilled meat right now,” Castiel said as he stood up and dusted his hands on the front of his jeans. “Roadhouse?”

“Burgers and fries,” Dean confirmed. “And Ellen threw in some pie, but she says it’s in exchange for a jar of the tomatoes you told her you canned from our plants this summer. Since when do the two of you chat about cooking, anyway?”

“I’m a multi-faceted man, Dean,” Castiel said archly, lifting an eyebrow as he grinned and marched out of the room. Sitting back on his heels, Dean let himself take a moment to appreciate the view before following.

* * *

When Amelia had given them the directions to the campsite, in case the two vehicles got separated on the road, Dean had assumed that “state park” meant that they’d be camping in a fairly populated area, tamed of the rougher edges of nature. Instead, he saw the asphalt road narrow to a single lane, then turn to gravel, and finally begin to disappear under grass overgrowth before Jimmy’s station wagon came into view, parked at the edge of a treeline. A tiny single-track path heading into the deeper woods was just visible beyond it.

“Cas,” Dean said, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, “you sure this is an actual camping trip, and not just a convenient way to get rid of me if I don’t pass muster?”

“I did tell you Amelia was fond of the outdoors,” Castiel said mildly. When Dean’s eyebrows lifted and he opened his mouth to protest the apparent understatement, Castiel forestalled him with a raised hand. “They’ve brought Claire with them, Dean. They wouldn’t bring a child along if it wasn’t safe. They certainly wouldn’t bring a child if murder was under consideration.”

Dean hummed skeptically as he attempted to park the Impala to the side of the path without damaging the undercarriage. “Just promise me this. If I don’t survive the weekend, at least try to find my body? Dying would be bad enough, but I draw the line at winding up as carrion for whatever’s living out here. Drag the lake, send in bloodhounds, whatever.”

“I’m sure you think you’re being amusing, but could you please stop with that sort of imagery before one or both of us winds up lying awake all night, twitching at every noise?” Leaning over to drop a kiss on Dean’s cheekbone to soften the words of reproach, Castiel climbed out of the car and headed for the trunk to unload it without waiting for a response. 

Thankfully, even though most of Dean’s own camping experiences had been in places far more accommodating than this, the basics seemed to be the same. Everything they needed was stashed neatly in their packs, and the hike to the campsite wasn’t all that treacherous after all. They could hear Claire’s high-pitched squeals well before they reached the clearing in which Jimmy was attempting to erect a four-man dome tent by himself, while Amelia chased after their laughing child. Amelia was sweating and red-faced, gripping a bottle of insect repellent.

“Thank God,” Jimmy said when he saw them. “Extra sets of hands. Between the four of us, we might just be able to survive camping with a pup.” One of the tent poles, under tension, popped free as he spoke, and Castiel dropped his bag so he could help with wrestling it into submission.

“Uncle Dean!” Claire cried when she spotted them. She darted toward him, and Dean hastily shrugged out of his own pack so he could catch her before she knocked him on his ass. “Guess what? I have an Elsa sleeping bag! It’s blue and white and shiny.” She giggled as he lifted her in his arms.

“Awesome,” Dean said, making his way toward where Amelia had slumped against a tree. “Here, why don’t we put on some magic cream, too? I bet all princesses wear it when they’re in enchanted forests.”

Claire frowned at him. “The forest isn’t really enchanted, Uncle Dean,” she said, but she allowed Amelia to take her arm and start smearing the repellent into her skin anyway.

“Guess I heard wrong, then,” he said apologetically, smiling sheepishly at Amelia.

“Don’t even try to keep up,” Amelia said ruefully. “Just when you think you’re getting the hang of the conversation, the rules will change and you’ll be lost again.” Claire squirmed her way free and dropped to the ground, running toward her father, and Amelia sighed heavily. “The sleeping bag was the latest crisis. It’s really just a blue sleeping bag, but we had to do some fast creative thinking when she started to melt down this morning because apparently princesses only use pink blankets.”

Castiel called out at that point, gesturing toward their bags. Their own tent, a smaller ridge tent, was much simpler to erect, but even so, by the time they’d finished, sweat was already dampening their tee-shirts and making the fabric stick uncomfortably to their backs. The warmth of summer still lingered in the early autumn afternoon, especially where the trees were too thick to allow much air movement. When Jimmy suggested they hit the nearby lake to cool off, Dean was inside the tent and stripping out of his clothes almost before the thought had finished being verbalized.

In fact, he was so much on board with the idea that it took him a moment to realize he’d been lured into a corner, metaphorically. Claire was poking through the smooth pebbles on the bank, and Castiel and his brother were whooping and splashing each other happily and generally making such an entertaining sight that Dean almost startled when Amelia spoke. Sitting next to him on the flat rock and dangling her feet beside his into the cool water, she murmured, “Mating looks good on Castiel.” The words were innocent enough, but they definitely carried the hints of Serious Talk in the undertones.

“Yeah, maybe,” Dean agreed cautiously. “He looked good before, too.”

“Of course,” Amelia said with a laugh. “I did mate and marry his twin, so it’d be weird of me to disagree.”

Dean huffed a laugh, and they watched the brothers some more. Jimmy had tried to swim under the water and dunk Castiel, and now an all-out war was being waged. Jimmy barely managed to get his head above water and, flailing, call out to Amelia for help before Castiel submerged them both once more. Amelia just rolled her eyes fondly.

“But you know I’m not talking about that,” she went on. “He’s calmer now. Not that he was never relaxed before, I mean, but…well, he’s always been more of an upstream swimmer than Jimmy, as long as I’ve known them. Always had a crusade against something or other, always something to fight against. Or for.”

“Jimmy more of a go-with-the-flow guy?” Dean asked, eyes on the water fight.

“He’s more patient, I think,” Amelia said. “Jimmy’s willing to wait until he thinks he has a good chance of success when he’s working for something. Castiel would probably try to storm a fortress single-handedly if he thought it needed to be pulled down.”

Dean frowned thoughtfully. “I dunno,” he replied. “Cas is stubborn, but he’s not reckless, or at least not too much. He’d find a way to pull down the fortress, but he’d definitely have a plan in his head about the best way to do it.”

“Did he plan how to win you?” 

_Snap,_ went the trap in Dean’s head. _Walked right into it._ “Maybe,” he hedged. “I might have been a little oblivious about it, at least at first.” She didn’t need to know about all the planning in return that he himself had been doing in the meantime, especially since, at least in terms of seduction, it had wound up being sort of irrelevant.

Amelia shook her head, sighing; one corner of her mouth quirked up with humor. “Something to be said for tradition,” she said, lightly teasing. “I know Castiel says he has no room for—what did he say? ‘Antiquated rituals based on archaic views about gender.’ Archaic or not, at least it clears up confusion. Hard to misread a courting gift.”

Dean’s eyes drifted away from the antics in front of him (Jimmy had risen up from underneath Castiel, lifting him onto his shoulders before tossing him through the air to land with a splash) to note how Amelia was toying with a gold bracelet on her wrist. “That how he let you know he was interested?” he asked. “Jewelry?”

“Oh, no,” she said with a grin. “You don’t _start_ with jewelry. That’s too much, too fast. Technically, courting gifts are supposed to start with something perishable, not permanent. Flowers, you know. Candy, or something sweet like that.”

A memory struck Dean. _Castiel, sitting at a little table outside of a cafe, beaming up at Dean while holding a plastic box of pie. “This looks positively delicious, Dean. I'm very much looking forward to trying it."_ He choked on a startled laugh. “Like pie?” he said. “Yeah, there might have been…something like that.” _Wait until Cas hears that his omega courted him instead of the other way around._

“Ha! I knew he wasn’t always as radical as he insists!” Amelia hissed happily, pumping her fist. “And the flowers? Oh, but don’t tell me. He’s probably more of a potted plant than a bouquet giver. I’ve seen his garden.” 

Dean had been about to deny the allegation, but he caught himself before he could. “Um,” he said. “Would buying me seedlings count? Even if they were vegetables, not flowers?”

“From Castiel? That would absolutely be the kind of thing he’d use to try to court a mate,” she said with a smirk. “And it looks like it worked, didn’t it? He found someone who’d appreciate what he wanted to give, I guess.”

Turning back toward the lake, Dean contemplated his mate; the water wars had reached some sort of truce, and now the twins were floating lazily as they chatted and caught their breath. “In that case, though, what’s the difference between all the formal courting bullshi--uh, nonsense, I mean, and just regular little things you give somebody because you want to make them happy and spend more time with them?”

Amelia was silent for long enough that Dean turned to look at her. She was studying him with a fond expression. “Doesn’t have to be much of a difference at all,” she said. “It’s kind of the whole point, more than just sparkly trinkets or expensive jewelry. They’re ways to show the other person that you’re thinking about them, and that you want to be the one to make them happy.”

The sound of splashing footsteps pulled Dean’s attention forward once more, where Castiel was scaling the bank out of the lake and shaking the water from his hair. A familiar rush of warmth shot through Dean’s chest at the sight of Castiel’s gorgeous smile, pulling a matching grin to his own face before he realized. With water droplets streaming down his bare chest and glistening on his broad shoulders, he looked like some sort of Roman deity emerging from the sea.

“And, of course, it helps with the whole territoriality thing,” Amelia added.

“What?” Dean was only paying the barest attention to her, but the remark startled him from his reverie. When her words registered in his brain, he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s not Cas. I don’t think I’ve ever met a less controlling alpha in my life.”

“I’m not saying he’s overpossessive,” Amelia said quickly. “Jimmy’s not like that either. Believe me, if he ever tried to seriously tell me what to do, I’d be the first to shut that down. But you can’t expect me to believe that when it comes to the person he cares about most, an unrepentant crusader like Castiel doesn’t have a protective streak in him.”

“Okay, what am I walking into here?” said Castiel, stumbling over to the rock and dropping onto the warm surface. “Amelia, you wouldn’t be interrogating Dean, would you? It feels more like a deposition than a vacation over here.” 

Dean shifted uncomfortably under the questioning look Castiel was sending him. Ten minutes earlier, he would have been grateful for a reprieve from the awkward conversation, but on the heels of Amelia’s last remark, he couldn’t help but chafe a little at the thought that it looked like he needed to be rescued. “Nah, we’re fine,” he said as breezily as he could manage. “Just enjoying the sunshine. Hearing all the embarrassing stories about you and Jimmy in your awkward teen years, you know.”

The look of shocked betrayal Castiel turned on his sister-in-law made Dean snort, especially when Amelia easily followed his cue, widening her eyes with poorly feigned innocence that screamed mischief. The tension in the air evaporated as quickly as it had appeared, and between the teasing and the renewed water fight that followed, Dean managed to forget all about the tiny seed of concern that had started to take root in his gut.


	2. Your Lips Move (But I Can't Hear What You're Saying)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Square Two: Overprotective Alpha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Taking a little liberty with the prompt--it's all about perception.)

“Hey, Cas.”

“Mmph,” mumbled the lump buried snugly in the sleeping bag. There was no discernible movement, not even a twitch, to indicate that the lump was anything more than a rather grouchy rock. Dean nudged at it with his toe, and the lump responded exactly as vigorously as any rock might.

“Cas, you’re not getting out of this. For one thing, that’s not _my_ brother out there by the fire, making coffee and telling everybody to get a move on. Your family, your job to deal with them. And for another thing, it wasn’t _my_ idea to stay up so late last night just to check off some sort of exhibitionist kink from your sex bucket list.”

The corner of the sleeping bag was tugged down slightly, and one shadowed eye glared balefully through the gap. “You’re misrepresenting the facts,” Castiel muttered in a rough voice. 

“Hey, no lawyering on vacation,” Dean interjected with a playfully pointed finger.

“This tent fabric is scent-deadening, which is effective for more than just warding off animals,” Castiel said, continuing as if there had been no interruption. Yawning and stretching, he pulled the sleeping bag down from the rest of his face and blinked into the light filtering through the open flap behind Dean. “And while one of us was determined to test whether the canvas might also prevent sound from traveling, it wasn’t _me._ Any thoughts on who it might have been, Dean?”

Reddening slightly, and glad that the sun behind him was keeping his face cast in shadow, Dean bit the inside of his lip. Neither of the other adults in their party had mentioned hearing any of the noises that Castiel, for all his blame-throwing, had been intent on wringing from Dean in the bug-chirping stillness of the night. Jimmy’s smirk had been a little on the leering side, though, and it probably wasn’t Dean’s imagination that Amelia’s eyebrow lift had been subtly eloquent. 

“Yeah, anyway,” he said, abandoning the teasing to try and salvage some dignity, “it’s hiking time, apparently. Jimmy’s fired up to go trekking up the side of this mountain to go see some fancy overlook, and he insists that the view is prettiest in the morning. You’re lucky he didn’t force us to get up even earlier, trying to get us there for sunrise. Hey, Cas, I think you forgot to mention that your identical twin is a freaking morning person.”

“That’s because I’m still hoping it’s just a phase.” Castiel groaned as he levered himself into a sitting position, cracking his back as he twisted from side to side. “It’s certainly not genetic, anyway.”

“Well, I think it might also have had something to do with their adorable little alarm clock,” Dean said, tilting his head toward the flap. Outside, they could hear the high-pitched voice of a little girl loudly demanding more bacon. “She really doesn’t have an off button, does she?”

Castiel’s wry look spoke volumes. He turned to rummage through his bag for a shirt and a pair of jeans. “Feels warm already,” he said over his shoulder. “At least it shouldn’t be too hot, going this early. It’ll be buggy, though.”

Dean grimaced in acknowledgment. “Great. Love being the first person on a trail in the morning, so you get to discover all the spider web booby traps with your face.”

“We’ll let Jimmy take the lead.” Castiel tossed a bottle of bug spray to Dean and nodded his head toward it. “The good stuff. I hate itching.”

“Right there with you,” Dean grumbled. “Should have put on more of this yesterday, after we got back from the lake.” That overlooked detail had paid him back with a dozen nagging bites across his arms and legs. One bad spot on the back of his right thigh had actually kept him awake with the burning and itching.

They finished getting ready for the day before stepping out of the tent and into the open air. “Okay, let’s get this party rolling,” Castiel said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “Coffee?”

“Here,” said Amelia, handing over a tin mug that steamed. “Bacon and egg sandwiches, too. Better get your energy up—you’ll need it.”

Dean frowned. “Is it a rough hike?” he asked, glancing toward where Claire was digging holes in the dirt with a stick. 

“Nah, not at all,” Jimmy said reassuringly. “It’s a clear path, not too steep or too hard to follow. Little princess will be able to handle it just fine. Possibly too well, actually. She likes to run ahead, which means somebody has to chase after her. With four of us, though, it shouldn’t be a problem.” Castiel and Dean exchanged dubious looks, but the message passed between them silently: there was no point in voicing skepticism. 

By the time the group was loaded up with water and some protein bars, along with other hiking necessities, the sun was heating the canopy even more. Sweat beaded along hairlines, and Dean wrapped a cloth bandana around his forehead to keep the drops from rolling into his eyes. Sure enough, there were plenty of tiny insects flitting through the air, and all of the hikers were constantly waving hands in front of their faces to keep from accidentally inhaling any.

At first, Claire seemed to be the only person unbothered by either heat or bugs. She was covering twice as much distance as the rest of them, dashing from side to side of the trail to investigate various flowers or interesting rocks. Dean felt exhausted just watching her; he sent up a silent prayer that if and when he and Castiel ever decided to have pups of their own, they’d be a little less intense, at least some of the time. Maybe he needed to step up his running routine, just in case, because nobody else in the group appeared to be struggling as much as he was.

About thirty minutes into the hike, though, the proceedings came to an abrupt halt. “Ow,” Claire suddenly muttered, coming to a stop. “Ow!” she repeated, lifting one foot and poking at it.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Jimmy said, puffing up to her. “Rock in your shoe? Here, let me help.”

“No!” Her stubborn refusal was predictable, Dean felt. Claire dropped to the ground, right in the middle of the dirt path, and started jerking at her laces. “My toes,” she whined. “They pinch.”

Amelia made a vexed sound in her throat. “Crap,” she said. “We just got her those shoes two months ago. No way could she have outgrown them already.”

“Guess again,” said Jimmy, who’d managed to convince Claire to let him feel around the toe of the sneaker. “Growth spurt?”

“They _hurt,"_ Claire whimpered. “I can’t _walk._ I want to go back to the water.”

Jimmy winced. “Claire-Bear, the lake is way back the way we came, and even further past that in the other direction.” Claire glared at him, setting her jaw in mute refusal. “What if Daddy carried you up the mountain?”

“No!” She folded her arms across her chest, and color rose alarmingly in her cheeks. “I’m not going up the mountain! I want to go to the lake!”

“Claire, that’s enough,” Amelia said sternly. “We do not yell at Daddy, and we don’t throw tantrums.”

“We apparently do,” Dean whispered into Castiel’s ear as quietly as he could. “Just saying.”

Claire, too, was unimpressed by her mother’s inaccurate statement. Her eyebrows met in the middle of her creased forehead, and her breathing picked up as her lips trembled. Jimmy, sensing the coming explosion, closed his eyes and took a deep breath of his own.

“Hey,” Dean found himself interrupting in hope of defusing things before they reached DEFCON 1 levels. “You know, I’m a little beat, myself. I’m not a seasoned hiker like you all are. It wouldn’t bother me a bit to go back with her and hang out at the campsite until you guys get back.” In all honesty, Dean was actually starting to drag more than he wanted to admit, just from the half hour they’d walked. The heat was starting to get to him, he supposed, and if he could help out the family while also getting to sit and rest himself, he’d count it as a win-win.

Amelia looked torn. “I don’t want to encourage this sort of behavior,” she said. 

“On the other hand, does it feel like anyone’s going to have a good time if we force this issue right now?” Jimmy said quietly, standing up and leaning in to speak to the rest of the group. “Not like we won’t have plenty of chances to teach the lesson later. Those shoes are really tight, and she’s in pain.” Amelia huffed, nodding reluctantly.

“I’ll take her back,” Castiel said suddenly. Dean turned to look at him questioningly. “I don’t mind, either, and you should go with Jimmy and Amelia, Dean.”

“I already told you, I’m cool with going back to camp,” Dean protested. “You go on, hang out with your brother. Claire and I can have a tea party or something.”

Castiel looked unhappy, lips pursed in concern. “I just think…” His sentence trailed off uncertainly as they locked eyes, and his nostrils flared slightly as he scented the air around them.

“You just think…what?” Dean said. He was starting to feel a tightness in his chest and a heat flaring in his cheeks. The look of odd unease on Castiel’s face suddenly reminded him of what Amelia had said the day before. “What, you think I can’t handle walking a mile downhill by myself without help? It’s a straight path, Cas. I think I can do it all by my big boy self.”

Castiel’s scent, masked somewhat by the bug lotion, had been edged with worry before that point, but now hurt filtered through it. “You know that’s not what I meant,” he said. “Of course, I know you don’t need my help. You’ve just seemed maybe a little run down this morning, and I thought it might be better not to have to carry Claire the whole way—”

“You know what, I don’t need to be told what I’m capable of doing.” The combination of Dean’s indignation, his unexpected fatigue, and the goddamn spot on his right leg that was making him want to drive an actual _knife_ into it just to get it to stop itching—they all came together to have him flushing hot and cold, slightly dizzy with it. “Why don’t you just go take a look at the treetops or whatever, and I’ll see you when you get back.” Part of his brain was mortified by the sudden realization that Jimmy and Amelia were bearing witness to his tirade; a glance to the side showed that they were both wearing looks of extreme discomfort. He closed his eyes and tried to calm his racing pulse. 

“Look, I’m fine,” he addressed the whole group, more quietly. “I don’t want to ruin the day, here. Maybe it’s better if I head back now, anyway. I’m probably a little dehydrated or something. Getting kind of a headache.” That was a large understatement, but definitely not a lie. “Claire and I can go back down the hill, drink some water, and maybe even get some lunch ready for you guys for when you get back. Okay?” An awkward silence passed, as Amelia and Jimmy seemed unsure about how to avoid taking sides, and Castiel just looked purely wounded. Dean sighed. “Cas.”

Reluctantly, Castiel finally nodded, looking down at the dirt. “There’s some Tylenol in our bags,” he said. “For if the water doesn’t help your headache.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Dean replied. He still felt like his head wanted to pop with pressure, and sweat droplets felt like ice dripping along his overheated neck, and it was making it hard for him to sort out his feelings of irritation from all the physical complaints. “See you later. Hey, Claire, need a lift back to camp?” Lifting her into his arms, Dean almost staggered unexpectedly under the weight, but he covered the momentary weakness with a couple of bounces that made her giggle. Sliding her around to his back, Dean gritted his teeth behind a tight smile as he headed back along the trail.

* * *

Claire was warbling her way for the fourth time through some song Dean thought might have been from Mulan, but he wasn’t paying too much attention. His pulse was thundering in his ears, and each thud was like an anvil blow to his temple. There was sweat running into his eyes, and the trees around them were shimmering and swaying as if they were underwater, making it hard to focus.

Maybe he really was underwater. That would explain why everything sounded sort of muffled. “But then why would I be so freaking thirsty?” he mumbled to himself.

“Uncle Dean,” Claire said, her mouth inches from his ear. “Are we almost there?” Her feet drummed against his waist pack, which was fairly useless since he’d drained the last drops from the bottle of water inside.

“Um, sure,” he answered, even though he really had no idea. He’d completely lost track of time, and he didn’t know whether they’d been walking for ten minutes or an hour. Claire seemed to weigh as much as a linebacker, and Dean’s knees were starting to wobble a little as he plodded.

_Gonna lie down in the tent,_ he told himself. _Just need some shade, some rest, and a few gallons of water to drink. God, what the hell? How the hell is this trip kicking my ass so badly?_

Without warning, one of his legs started to buckle, and he barely managed to keep from falling forward onto his face. “Whoa,” he grunted. Claire’s grip shifted, causing her to slip precariously to the side, and she squeaked in surprise. “I gotcha, sweetie,” Dean said, attempting futilely to correct their balance. It wasn’t happening, though, and all he could do was control her slide to the ground.

“Yuck,” she complained, pulling her wet shirt away from her chest. “You sweated on me.”

“Sorry,” Dean said as he blinked and rubbed at his eyes. “Hey, how about we take just a little break for a minute? Let me stretch my arms back out? You’re getting…getting to be such a…big girl.” He was panting a bit, the air too thick to fill his lungs.

Claire looked threateningly mutinous. “But it’s hot,” she complained. “I want to put on my swimsuit.”

“Yeah, I know,” Dean sighed. Now that he’d stopped moving, the sun on his skin seemed even hotter, which he hadn’t thought possible. All the little bug bites on his arms felt like burning match heads, and the worst one, being rubbed by his jeans, was actually verging on agonizing. “What if we ducked into the shade for a second, huh? Just a couple of minutes to sit down, and we’ll head on.”

“We can’t leave the trail,” Claire said solemnly. “There might be a Big Bad Wolf.”

“Well, good thing you’re not wearing a red cloak,” Dean retorted. Grimacing in anticipation of the effort, he hefted Claire back up and onto his hip before making his way into the trees. It was only marginally cooler out of the sun, but at least it was something. Dropping Claire to the ground again, he braced his back against a nearby tree and sighed as he tried to scratch at his leg.

_Okay, so I might feel like shit, but that doesn’t mean it was all right for Cas to start getting overprotective,_ he told himself. For some reason, his inner voice didn’t sound nearly as convincing anymore. Recalling the look of hurt Castiel had worn when Dean had scolded him, a twinge of remorse squeezed at his heart. _Why did I react like that? Lots of people say crap like Amelia did, and I’ve never let it get to me before._

Ruefully, Dean admitted the truth to himself now: if he heard Castiel trotting along the path after them right at that moment, he’d be hard pressed to feel anything other than relief. _And not just because he’d have more water, either, even as badly as I could use it right now._

“Hey, Claire, sweetheart,” Dean called. She was crouched over a small patch of moss, intently studying something crawling across it. “Does your little canteen still have any water in it?”

Sitting back on her heels, Claire lifted the purple bottle that hung around her neck on an embroidered strap. When she shook it, there was a sound of quiet sloshing. “Yes,” she affirmed.

Dean hated the idea of taking water from a child, but if they wanted to get back to camp any time soon, he knew he needed it. “Can Uncle Dean have a little drink?” he asked. 

Claire unscrewed the cap and offered it to him, then watched as he splashed some of the water into his parched mouth. “Your face is very red,” she commented.

“Thanks.”

“Are you sick?” She tilted her head to the side to scrutinize him, and for a moment, despite the blonde curls, she reminded him sharply of Castiel. “Do you have a fever?”

Dean laughed shortly, shaking his head. He immediately regretted it, as the forest kept spinning a little when he’d stopped. Letting his legs fold under him and dropping to sit on the ground, Dean rubbed at his temples. “I’m fine,” he told Claire.

“When I have a fever, Mommy gives me Pee-dee-lite,” Claire said, continuing to observe him critically. “And she puts her hand on me like this.” Leaning forward, she placed one tiny palm on his forehead, and Dean gasped at the contrasting coolness of her skin. “I think you have a fever, Uncle Dean. Your head is very, very hot,” she said.

Maybe she was right, he thought. Castiel was never going to let him hear the end of it if he had somehow given himself heat stroke or some other avoidable nonsense, but that would come later. “No Pedialyte in the woods,” Dean said. “And I’m out of water.” If there was even a little stream anywhere near, he could use the water purifying tabs in his pack, but…

“Hey, moss grows near water, right?” he said with a sudden idea. “So we can’t be too far from something. You think you could help me listen for some water, Claire? Like a river splashing?”

Claire tipped her head, listening. They were quiet for a few moments, but the only sound was their breathing, the rustle of leaves, and the dull pounding in Dean’s head. “Okay, new plan,” Dean said. “Water goes downhill, so I’m just going to go peek over that ridge there and see. If there’s no water in view, we’ll give up and just keep heading back.”

The ridge was only about fifty feet away from where they sat, so he wasn’t concerned about leaving her there, in plain sight, while going to investigate. As he stood, his right leg rippled with an alarming surge of searing pain that radiated outward from his thigh. For a moment, he was afraid it wouldn’t support him at all, but the pain receded to a more manageable level after a couple of breathless seconds as he gripped his leg with both hands.

_Well, this can’t be good._ _Dehydration can cause muscle cramps, but that was something else entirely._ Cursing under his breath and hoping that Claire would be unable to discern the words, Dean lurched forward, putting most of his weight on his left leg. Carefully, cringing, he made his way down the shallow slope to the ridge. Leaf-covered branches obscured his view, so Dean reached forward and pushed some of them out of the way. 

A cracking sound, sharp and unexpected, startled Dean as a branch under his left foot snapped and threw him off-balance. He tried to catch himself with his right foot, but the earlier pain returned in spades, and he hissed as he pitched forward into the branches overhanging the drop-off.

On the upside, at least there was a small stream waiting for him at the bottom when he plunged over the edge and downward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All this is un-beta'ed, by the way, so if you see something strange, let me know. You know, something other than whatever's going on with Dean right now.


	3. In the Forest I'm Burning, Struck Down by the Blast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Square Three: Scent-Marking

Honestly, it was just a bunch of trees. Viewing them from above instead of below was just a change in perspective, not something that automatically imbued them with poetry-inspiring beauty. Leaves were leaves, whether one was looking upward or down.

“You won’t be able to set the trees on fire with your eyes,” Jimmy said. Castiel turned toward his brother, and Jimmy hastily lifted a hand in placation. “Not that I doubt the effort. If anyone could spontaneously generate laser beams from their optic nerves, I’d put my money on you. Maybe don’t do it while we’re standing in the middle of the woods, though.”

Castiel rolled his eyes, turning back toward the overlook. It was still just trees. Amelia, on the other side of the overlook, was snapping photos of them like she’d been possessed by Ansel Adams.

“Seriously, though, what’s crawled down your boxers? That argument? You guys must really be early in the honeymoon stage for a little tiff like that to get you this upset. You’re both just grouchy from the heat and tiredness. Which I wasn’t going to remark on at all, but you actually managed to keep  _ me _ up for some of it, so I’m both unsympathetic and a little impressed.”

“My apologies. Also, shut up.” Castiel kicked at a rock, watching it bounce over the edge of the overlook and down the steep embankment before disappearing into the brush. “Are we ready to head back yet?”

“We just got here! Let’s take at least a few minutes to appreciate the whole reason we climbed up here, okay? Come on, Cassie, your man wasn’t wrong. He doesn’t need us to go rushing back to camp to check up on him. Claire’s probably got him weaving flower crowns for everybody right now.” Jimmy leaned back against the guard rail, resting on his elbows. “Besides, there’s a nice breeze up here, and I want to enjoy it.”

Jamming his hands into his pocket, Castiel thumbed the edge of his cell phone. Naturally, there was no signal at all, making it nothing more than a camera with an added flashlight. Not that he’d been trying to text Dean or anything. He absolutely trusted Dean to take care of himself. Of course he did.

Only…

“He didn’t seem a little…off to you?” Castiel asked, the note of anxiety he’d been working to suppress all morning rising up once more. “More than just sweaty and tired?”

Jimmy frowned thoughtfully. “I couldn’t say. He was tense, but, I mean, he’s still getting comfortable with us and getting to know us. Amelia was kind of cagey about it, but I got the feeling she might have been a little on the nosy side when we were at the lake, and maybe he felt awkward about that?”

“Maybe.” They stood together quietly for a few moments, watching some birds circling low over some trees below them. “I’m not used to this,” Castiel said finally. “Dean is…he’s…”

“He’s your mate,” Jimmy finished. “You don’t have to explain it to me. When you love someone, let them in that deep, you can’t help feeling it when they’re upset, for whatever reason. It hurts to see them anything less than content.”

“I’m not pushing too much, though, am I?” Castiel asked. “You know that I never wanted to be that kind of mate. One of the things I’ve always loved about Dean is his independence. I’d never want to take a bit of that from him, and he knows that. At least, I thought he did.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, pursing his lips. “You did get a little fussy over him, maybe. He overreacted, don’t get me wrong, but you were a little weird, too. It was just a little hike down the hill. Is his sense of direction that atrocious or something?”

“Absolutely not,” Castiel said, smiling slightly. “He’s got a better inner compass than I do. He’s extremely capable of handling himself, and…and any other day, at any other time, I don’t think I’d have blinked if he’d told me he wanted to go hiking by himself.” Jimmy didn’t say anything; he raised his eyebrows, waiting for Castiel to go on. “I don’t know. He was hurting, but, well, I’ve seen him handle the pain from sore muscles. I’ve seen him literally collapse from exhaustion at the end of a race, and this was different. His scent was…” He stopped, shaking his head.

“Heat exhaustion?” Jimmy suggested.

“Possibly,” Castiel conceded, though that didn’t sit right either. “If it was, then I’m an awful person for trying to get him to finish the hike.”

“No, you’re not. You just didn’t want him to be alone, which makes sense.” Pushing himself away from the rail, Jimmy dusted off the back of his pants. “Tell you what. I’ll go see if Madame Photographer is almost finished, and then we can trot back down. I feel a little guilty leaving a potentially sick man in charge of our hell-pup, to tell you the truth.”

Watching Jimmy walk toward his wife, Castiel felt a little mollified, but at the same time, he couldn’t rid himself of the strange feeling of urgency in his heart, telling him he needed to hurry.

* * *

“Ouch,” Dean groaned, one side of his face pressed into a soggy pile of muddy leaves and sludge. He tried to shift, to get his face out of the nastiness, but a lightning bolt of pain shot through his forearm when he pushed against the earth. Broken, he thought, maybe. If that was the worst of the damage, though, he’d consider himself lucky.

Carefully rolling onto his back, he squinted upward in the direction he’d fallen. Thankfully, it hadn’t been a terrifically long drop. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been a clean fall, and he was pretty sure he remembered banging various parts of himself against at least half the tree trunks and big rocks that lay between his current position on the ground and the broken branches at the top of the rise. 

At least the pain in his arm was almost enough to distract from the torture in his leg. Using his other arm, which at least seemed to be intact, he cautiously levered his torso off the ground to assess the rest of the fallout. Certainly, the fall had done his headache no favors. His head swam as he attempted to focus. He was laying on a slope, his lower legs soaking in the water he’d wanted to find.  _ Not quite like this, though. _ He was bleeding from a number of gashes and scrapes, but none of them appeared to be too serious. Fearing worst-case scenarios, he gingerly tested the movement of his legs, and for the space of a few seconds, he felt relieved that at least he’d managed not to paralyze himself or anything.

Then, when he tried to bend his right leg at the knee, he couldn’t hold back the cry of pain ripped from his throat.

“Uncle Dean!” 

Gritting his teeth harshly, Dean turned to stare back up the rise. Claire was peeking down at him, her eyes huge and terrified, from between the leaves. “Claire, don’t move!” he shouted, suddenly more afraid than he’d been at any point up until then. “You stay right there, and don’t get any closer to the edge!”

The distance between them, along with Dean’s unfocused vision, kept him from seeing the tears welling in her eyes, but he definitely heard them in her voice. “I don’t like this! I want Mommy!”

“You and me both, kiddo,” Dean mumbled. What the hell was he supposed to do now? There was absolutely no way he was getting back up to Claire any time soon, but he couldn’t very well leave a four-year-old all alone here, let alone send her off by herself into the woods to find help. Were there wild animals around here? He didn’t even know, but the fact that he wasn’t sure made the risk a bad one. 

“Mommy says…” Claire sniffled, rubbing at her eyes. “Mommy says if I ever get lost, I’m supposed to stay still, and she’ll find me.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Dean agreed, mind racing. But there were a lot of trees around here, and the trail between the overlook and the camp was long enough that Castiel and his brother and sister-in-law would have a lot of ground to try to search. And that was assuming they guessed that Dean and Claire had gone missing along the trail, not that they’d gone to the lake and drowned, or that they’d gone flower-picking in the forest around the campsite… 

“Claire, baby, listen to me,” he said, a plan trying to grow in his head. “Back where we were sitting. Could you see the trail from there?”

“Uh-huh,” she whimpered, nodding. 

“Okay.” He pushed himself a little more upright, suppressing a groan at the effort and the hurt. “Okay, baby, I need you to listen to me. Mommy and Daddy are going to come find us, but we might need to give them a little help. They’ll be able to find us much faster if they can smell us, right? So I want you to walk back toward the trail, but be real, real careful. You know how Mommy and Daddy sometimes snuggle up with you so you can scent each other?”

Claire was still weepy, but she sounded stronger when she answered, trying so hard to be brave. “At bedtime, after my story. So I can have good dreams.”

“That’s good,” he said, swallowing through a surge of nausea. Better hurry up. “I want you to go to the trees by the trail and…and scent the trees. Just rub your arms on them, get ‘em smelling like you. Then you come right back here, okay? Not  _ here, _ I mean—you stay up there. I just want to be able to see you, until they get here.”

“Okay, Uncle Dean,” Claire said, sniffing hard before disappearing from his view. Dean let his head fall back, closing his eyes. God, he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake. He had a bad feeling, though, that playing it safe and just waiting it out wasn’t going to be a viable option for long.

Something was clearly very wrong with his right leg. It wasn’t something that had happened from the fall, or at least not just from that. Placing one hand on top of it, he could feel that his thigh was swollen, tightening the denim of his jeans, and warm. The fall had torn a hole in the knee of the jeans, and, dreading what he would see, Dean dug his fingers into the edges and ripped it to further enlarge the tear. It was difficult, using only his good hand to work, but when he finally got the tear large enough to let him pull the hole upward over his thigh, he felt his eyes pop. 

“Shit.” The flesh was red, unevenly covered with a weird rash that looked like it got worse as it disappeared around the back of his thigh.  _ Right toward that bug bite. Really starting to doubt that it came from a mosquito. _ Dean delicately probed under the denim, forcing himself to explore the skin he couldn’t see, but he yanked his hand out when it felt like an electrical surge of agony tore through his leg. What he’d managed to feel, though, made him glad he couldn’t see it. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Well, that settled it. If he managed to make it out of here, hewas going to let Castiel wrap him up in fucking bubble wrap and protect him to his heart’s content. He wasn’t going to complain at all, just so long as he got the chance to see those blue eyes smiling down at him again.

In the distance, he thought he could hear Claire talking to herself, or maybe to some woodland creatures that he just hoped weren’t carnivorous. Suddenly drained of the last of his energy, Dean let himself drop back onto his back with a squelch of mud, closed his eyes, and let the world spin.

* * *

Castiel and the others had made it back to camp much quicker than they’d made the trek out, and not just because it was a downhill trip. The silence that greeted them felt ominous, and he spun around with wild eyes. “Where are they?” he said, striding toward the tent.

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy. He sounded truly concerned, for the first time all morning. “Maybe they went swimming.”

“Not without bathing suits,” Amelia pointed out. She gestured toward the line they’d strung between a pole and a tree branch, where Claire’s suit was still hanging in the spot they’d hung it to dry the day before.

“I don’t like this at all,” Castiel said. The tiny warning bells that had been chiming in the back of his head were now resounding loudly through his brain, obscuring all other thought. Inhaling deeply, he growled in the back of his throat. “I can’t smell them. They haven’t been back here.”

Jimmy and Amelia exchanged worried looks. “Let’s not panic yet,” Jimmy said, though his tone wasn’t convincing. 

“When should we panic?” Castiel snapped. “When it starts getting dark? When we find some scraps of their clothing?”

Amelia laid a hand on his shoulder, and he barely managed to keep himself from throwing it off. “What Jimmy’s saying is that panicking isn’t going to help,” she said. “We’re going to retrace our steps and find them. They haven’t had time to get very lost, if that’s what happened. I can’t think how they could have gotten lost in the first place, and this part of the park is populated enough that any animals that might present a danger avoid it.”

Castiel, however, had passed the point of calm logic. “Then what does that leave? Something unexpected that made them deliberately leave the path, that kept them from being able to make it here, which nobody might have anticipated? Dean is not stupid! He wouldn’t have just wandered into the wilderness, especially with a child!” The growl in his voice was building as his fear rose, and Jimmy moved to step between his mate and his brother. 

“Castiel, you need to sit down, right now,” Jimmy said, pitching his voice deep and squaring his shoulders. They could have counted on one hand the number of times throughout their lives that he’d challenged his brother like this; neither of them had ever gone in much for alpha dominance displays, particularly against each other. This situation was swiftly evolving into a potential disaster, though, and an alpha going feral with fear for his mate would be one of the worst possible additions to the scene.

Castiel and Jimmy glared at each other, tension between them rising as neither of them conceded an inch. For a long moment, it seemed likely that violence would erupt. At last, Castiel sagged, as though the strings that had been holding him up had been cut. His growl broke, replaced with a thin whine, and he buried his face in his hands. The danger past, Jimmy crossed the space between them and pulled Castiel against his chest.

“We’re going to find them, Cassie,” Jimmy murmured. “I’ve got an emergency radio in the car, and I can run back and call for help on that. Amelia is right, they couldn’t have gotten far. My guess is that they’re somewhere back the way we came, or else those damned shoes of Claire’s would be here with our things. No way would she have kept them on any longer than she had to.”

“I’m so sorry,” Castiel said into Jimmy’s shoulder. “Your pup is missing and I’m completely losing my head.”

“Yeah, well, we all do sometimes. You were already on edge about Dean, and now it’s looking like your worries were justified, so you went a little crazy. Reminded me of your wild, scary high school days a little,” Jimmy said with a tiny laugh. 

Castiel tried to smile back, but his face was still pinched with worry. “He’s hurt,” he whispered. “Or sick. What if he’s out there somewhere, unable to call for help If anything happens to him—”

Jimmy cut him off sharply. “It won’t,” he said. “Don’t go there. Do not get ahead of yourself. Now, you go with Amelia and let me go get that radio. It’s just a precaution, but this is one of the reasons we have park rangers in the first place. Now, are you going to be okay to hold yourself together so we can do this?” He ducked his head, searching Castiel’s eyes for affirmation.

Castiel ran a hand over his jaw, restlessly scrubbing at the scratchy stubble. “Yes,” he said. “Go, call the ranger. Make sure he knows we might need a doctor, just…”  _ Just in case I’m not being paranoid about this, _ he didn’t say out loud. Jimmy nodded, hearing it all the same. 


	4. Just Another Heart In Need of Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Square four: Butter/Fried Eggs/Bacon
> 
> (Which is a very weird square, in my opinion, but I really liked the idea of completing an actual line on my Bingo card, so I made it work.)

Thirsty. He was thirstier than he’d ever been in his entire life, with the heat inside him drying the inside of his mouth until it felt rougher than sandpaper. He was burning up, his skin too tight and sore; moments (or maybe hours) later, he was shivering so badly that his teeth chattered. The water in the stream had soaked the legs of his jeans, and the cold, wet material was torture as he shook and trembled.

Dean’s water bottle had cracked when he’d fallen, so he couldn’t use it to collect drinking water to treat with the purifying tablets. When the urge became too strong to suppress, he tried to drink the water anyway, scooping some out with his hands. After all, he was already sick, so maybe it was worth the risk. It didn’t matter in the end; after a few gulps, his stomach violently rebelled, expelling the small amount he’d managed to consume. 

“Uncle Dean, are you more sick?” Claire called down to him in concern. In the back of Dean’s head, the part that was still capable of thinking straight, he was wholly impressed by the kid. She’d done everything he asked—well, he assumed, since he couldn’t actually see for himself—and other than her initial crying, she was doing an amazing job at trying to stay calm. 

_Or maybe she’s just in shock, or too scared to process any of this._

“I’m okay, baby,” he tried to reply, but his tongue felt thick in his mouth and he was pretty sure the words were slurred at best. “Tired,” he attempted again. “Mommy’s coming soon.”

Whether or not she’d understood him, Claire stayed quiet for a while after that, playing with a pile of leaves she was collecting in her lap. Dean tried to keep his eyes open as much as he could, watching her while she sat with her feet dangling over the ledge. With the sunlight glinting off her golden curls, and the shadows dappling her face, she looked like she could be a fairy child. His brain toyed with that idea for a while, churning nonsense thoughts of fluttery wings and tiny giggling voices.

“Stupid bugs,” he muttered after a while, when the burning in his leg started pulsing with his heartbeat again. “Stupid bugs with their stupid bites.” Dean still had no idea what on earth could have happened. As far as he knew, he wasn’t allergic to bees or anything like that, and even though he’d only seen allergic reactions to stings in movies or on TV, he was pretty sure that trouble breathing was a thing with those. The rash and swelling of his leg, the horrifying lump he’d felt in that awful moment of discovery, and the fever Claire had actually diagnosed with impressive accuracy for a preschooler—these were more like a spreading poison.

_Are there poisonous snakes here? Could I have gotten bit by a snake without noticing?_ “I don’t sleep that deeply,” he said to himself.

“I dunno, you did sleep through it when I colored on your face with a Sharpie, back in high school,” Sam said. Dean blinked his eyes open, not remembering having closed them in the first place. Sam was grinning at him from the other side of the stream, sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees where they were drawn up in front of him. For some reason, his hair was falling over his eyes in the shaggy mop he hadn’t worn since college.

“Sammy, how did you get here?” Dean whispered. His thoughts were too slow, and he struggled to make them work. Sam hadn’t been on this trip…had he? Dean couldn’t remember.

“You don’t look so good, Dean,” Sam replied without answering Dean’s question. “You better get cleaned up, or Ellen won’t let you come in the house for dinner. She made burgers, too, and I think there’s some pie.”

Dean squeezed his eyes shut, licking his lips to ease the dryness. “No burgers,” he mumbled. “I need water, Sammy. Can I have a glass of water? Please get me some water, Sam, please.”

“Burgers and pie and pretzels and beer,” Sam chanted. He laughed, and it echoed strangely all around them. “And I’ve got some fireworks for later, when the sun goes down and the time runs out.”

“Time…” Dean repeated in a haze. “When the sun goes down. No, I don’t want…I can’t stay here in the dark. I have to…” _Have to what? I have to be somewhere else, not here. Where am I?_

“Uncle Dean,” called a little voice. “Uncle Dean, are you talking? Who are you talking to?”

Dean fought to open his eyes again, the effort monumental. “Claire,” he rasped, squinting at her. Turning his head, he saw that he was alone; Sam had left. _Sam was here? Why did I think that?_ He realized with a chill of horror that the fever had reached the point of hallucinations.

_Cas, I hope you’re coming fast,_ he said to himself as the chills began to sweep over him once more. 

* * *

“Most likely, they saw something off the path and went wandering to get a look,” the genial ranger was saying in a reassuring tone. “Lots of folks get themselves worked up over things that ain’t even possible, let alone likely. Pretty much all the bigger animals around here are more likely to go for rabbits or squirrels than people.”

Amelia nodded seriously, but Castiel was still feeling too restless to stay still and listen. “That’s fine, but we’re talking about a pup and someone who may be injured or ill. I’ve seen only three rangers. How can you find anyone in a park this size with so few of you?”

The ranger—Lafitte, his badge said—was unperturbed by Castiel’s impatience. “Well, there’s others out there, too. But like I said, we’re playing the odds. Your people likely won’t have gotten far, and there are a lot of trails that criss-cross the forests, so even if they’d walked a straight path directly away from where you expected them to be, it wouldn’t have been long before they hit another trail, ran into some other folks…you get it. Until we hear of something like that, we’ll concentrate on the areas of woods between the trail you were on, bounded on the outside by the nearest other trails. We already set up blocks on all those trails, first thing, so if they wander out on their own, we’ll know. If we don’t find ‘em in that area, there are more search teams we’ll call. Even if we had to search every bit of this park, which I don’t believe we will, we’re equipped to do it.”

Castiel wanted to press, to ask whether the rangers were equipped to do so before it got dark, or something else happened to Dean and Claire, but he held his tongue. 

“Now, this is the part where I usually tell y’all to sit tight and let us do our job, but I get the feeling you’re not going to listen,” Ranger Lafitte said, smiling when Castiel proved him right by starting to object partway through the sentence. “So I’ll tell you what. I will not have you wandering around the woods doing your own hunting, because that way leads to us having to do even more search and rescue jobs. What I’ll do is let you ride along with me, back up the path, while I do my job.” 

The wry twinkle in his eye clearly said that he knew how transparent the real reason behind the offer was. Castiel didn’t care if he was being placated to keep him from doing anything stupid, though. The idea of sitting around a campfire with no idea what was happening made him want to break things. He and Amelia climbed into the back of the ranger’s ATV, and once more they started back up the trail toward the overlook.

It was vexing, now, to notice how wide the dirt path was, and how many footprints covered the surface. How on earth could they ever know where Dean and Claire might have gone off the trail? Amelia, like Castiel, was peering into the shadows between the trees, looking for any trace of movement, any flash of a color besides green or brown. Claire had been wearing a pink shirt, which should have stood out like a beacon, Castiel thought. 

“What about dogs?” Amelia called over the sound of the motor. “Don’t you use hounds, looking for people’s scents?”

“Yeah, we do,” Ranger Lafitte said. “Garth should be reaching your camp right now with his trackers, so your mate can give them something to sniff.”

With a pang, Castiel again recalled Dean’s scent from earlier. It had smelled…yellow? If a color could be a scent, that would be the best he could do in trying to label what he’d detected. “What about us?” he asked. 

“No offense, but you’re not a bloodhound,” the ranger said, shaking his head. “You said yourself, there’s ground to cover, and even if it’s not the whole mountain, it’s still further than what you’re going to be able to scent without being right up on them.”

“But if we narrowed it down,” Castiel said, growing more determined. “We know the approximate point where they turned around and headed downhill. They left the trail somewhere between there and camp. If we just started there, scenting the sides of the trail, maybe we could pick up something?” Ranger Lafitte gave him a skeptical look, and Castiel could tell he was about to refuse. “What else are we going to be doing? You were going to be searching the edges of the trail anyway. What’s the harm in letting us walk the path, too?”

The ranger studied Castiel’s face, then looked at Amelia’s equally hopeful one. “Y’all want to be doing something,” he said. “I guess it won’t hurt anything. But if you set one foot into those woods, to chase after a hint of some smell, I will take you right back down to the ranger’s hut and make you sit there watching the Nature Channel until we find your folks.”

* * *

Sam hadn’t come back, but other people had been visiting Dean in his fevered haze. Some of them had just been words in his head, chattering and jabbering with voices that sounded like agitated birds. His mom had run cool hands over his forehead, gazing at him sadly without making a sound. At one point, Dean was sure that the weatherman from the evening news had been nudging him with the toe of his shoe, grimacing in disgust while speaking irritated gibberish.

Claire was talking to Dean more frequently, too. She was apparently becoming disturbed, with good reason, at Dean’s mumblings to people who weren’t actually there, and at first she had tried to get him to stop, but then she’d moved on to other tactics.

“Uncle Cas is going to make you all better,” she was telling him now. “You’ll see. It’s going to be okay, Uncle Dean. Are you hungry? Mommy will make you some noodle soup, and you’ll feel much, much better. So you shouldn’t worry. Mommy and Daddy and Uncle Cas will come find us very soon.”

It was a perverse switch of how the situation ought to be, if they had to be lost here in the first place, Dean thought. Surely, a child shouldn’t have to comfort and care for an adult, reassuring him and trying to ease his fears. He should have been able to console her; Claire shouldn’t have to be the strong one in this mess.

“But you screwed that up, didn’t you,” said his fourth grade teacher, shaking her finger at him scoldingly. Dean didn’t bother trying to offer Mrs. Davison any excuses, since he was reasonably certain she’d died ten years before and didn’t really need any. He blinked upward at the tree branches overhead, watching the leaves dance. The pain in his leg had actually abated somewhat, though he was fairly sure that it wasn’t a marker of good things.

Birds chirped in the distance. Claire was calling out, probably trying to keep him from falling asleep again, but he couldn’t make out her actual words, even as she got louder and more insistent. “I’m ‘wake,” he croaked, waving a hand in her direction. She kept yelling, and the piercing noise was going right to the aching spot in the front of his brain. And for some reason, on top of all that, now Dean started smelling breakfast foods. _Well, that’s new._ Bacon, fried eggs. Toast with butter.

_Wonder who I’m about to hallucinate now. Someone from the Food Network?_

“Uncle Dean is hurt!” Claire screamed, suddenly sharply intelligible, and Dean wondered why she was trying to tell him something he so obviously knew. Confused, he squinted, rolling his head to the side in the mud to try to get a better view of her up above. Her back was turned to him, and she was waving frantically at…something.

“Claire,” he attempted to call out. His voice cracked and hurt his dry throat. She didn’t even glance back at him, but then she vanished, sprinting out of sight. Dean’s stomach lurched, suddenly petrified that Claire was running off on her own with nothing he could do to stop her. “Claire,” he called again, louder. 

The face that appeared over the edge of the rise wasn’t his niece. It was a large, bearded man Dean had never seen in his life, and it was that unfamiliarity that made Dean suspect that this time, it wasn’t a fever vision. “Got him,” the man called loudly over his shoulder, drawling his words with a richly Southern accent. 

While Dean blinked dazedly, the man, with surprising agility, hoisted his legs over the edge, then cautiously slid his way down the embankment, using the rocks and roots as handholds to keep himself upright. Then he was kneeling in the mud beside Dean, and as Dean stared up into the man’s face, a single thought floated through his head.

“Man, you smell like breakfast.”

The stranger threw back his head and laughed, almost loud enough to cover the sound of Castiel, from the rise above them, sobbing Dean’s name as he broke down entirely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's even less edited than the others, because I'm at C2E2 in Chicago, and I'm really tired and hopped up on panels and fandom stuff and aaaaaaaah. Maybe I'll come back and re-edit it later. Also, I'm going to have to post the last chapter tomorrow, which means it technically won't count for the Bingo, but...oh well.


	5. See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Square five: Fluff!
> 
> (As though I'd be able to wrap up this installment in any other way.)

“Is she hurting you? I can take her if you need me to.” Castiel furrowed his brow in concern as he gazed at the pair of them. Claire had gone into full octopus mode the moment she’d come through the front door, making a bee-line for where Dean was laid out on the sofa and climbing up beside him to nestle herself under his chin. At Castiel’s suggestion of moving her elsewhere, Dean felt her little arms tighten around him.

“Nah, she’s fine,” he replied, patting her back awkwardly. “I missed her, too.”

It had been almost a week since their misadventure in the woods, and in that time he and Claire hadn’t seen each other in person once. Dean had been whisked away to the hospital emergency room, where they’d basically blasted him with weapons-grade antibiotics to fight the systemic infection his body was battling. A roomful of doctors had poked and prodded at the weird sore on his leg (which he was still extremely grateful that he couldn’t see for himself; seeing Castiel go paper-white and swallow convulsively at the sight of it had told Dean all he cared to know), before finally deciding he’d managed to be bitten by a spider.

_“A radioactive one?” Dean tried to joke, wanting to lighten the grave mood in the room at least a little. “Am I going to get superpowers? Might be worth it for that.”_

_The joke fell flat, sadly. “Brown recluse,” the head doctor said without a hint of a smile. Maybe he’d never read a comic book in his life. “At least, that’s what we suspect, without having the spider present to confirm. In most cases, a brown recluse bite would be a nuisance—painful, perhaps, but not incapacitating.”_

_“Guess I’m just special, then,” Dean sighed, and Castiel shuddered and buried his face in Dean’s hair._

They’d flushed his system so thoroughly that Dean suspected his kidneys were clean enough to sparkle, and they’d kept him happily topped up with pain medication to let him shift in his bed without wanting to scream. Days later, when his fever was finally under control and the doctors were confident that the bite was beginning to heal, they’d let him go home, sternly warned to continue daily wound care treatment if he didn’t want to wind up needing a skin graft.

Castiel had taken the doctor’s warning more seriously than he’d taken his swearing-in ceremony when he’d passed his bar exam.

Dean, for his part, was starting to feel a little antsy, after being basically bed-ridden so long, but the experience really had done a number on him; simply sitting up for too long left him feeling drained. It was frustrating, but he knew how lucky he was, how badly things might have gone. He’d had more than a few nightmares in which Claire had gotten hurt or lost while he’d lain helplessly in the mud, unable to do anything but shout and writhe, and he’d woken from those horrific visions in pools of sweat and with hoarse cries still tearing from his throat. Castiel had held him tightly every time, stroking his hair and murmuring reassurances that both he and Claire were safe.

All the same, it took finally getting to see the pup again for something deep in Dean’s chest to loosen, letting him breathe freely at last. She’d been unable to come see him in the ICU, of course, and it appeared that she’d been having just as much difficulty finding closure on the ordeal as he had.

“She hasn’t stopped asking about you,” Jimmy said. He and Amelia had trailed in after their daughter, settling into chairs as Castiel brought them drinks. “It got better after you guys Skyped in the hospital, but she’s still been demanding to know that you’re really okay. I guess she really needed to see for herself.”

Dean squeezed his niece as well as he could. “Told you,” he said softly to her. “I’m super tough. No dumb old bug’s going to keep me down for long.”

“It was a _mean_ spider,” Claire grumbled. She lifted her head a little to stare into his eyes. “Maybe it got eaten by a bird.”

“Hey, we can hope,” Dean agreed. “But you know what? Now that I’m home, you can come see me whenever you want. That’s pretty cool, right?”

Claire sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and reached for the little backpack she’d dropped before throwing herself onto the sofa. “I made you a picture,” she said, extracting the crayoned paper from inside. Dean took it from her, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek hard to keep the laugh from escaping. In violent fuschia and purple, a spider the size of a Volkswagen bus loomed over a prone figure he presumed was himself, based on the giant green eyes that took up his entire face. Behind the spider, a blonde figure with huge yellow curls was glaring and wielding something on a long stick. “It’s a flyswatter,” she informed Dean, pointing.

“A very good idea,” Castiel said. He’d come to the head of the couch to look at the picture from over Dean’s head. “We’ll have to make sure we always have plenty on hand.”

“Dean,” Amelia said, sounding hesitant. “I just…I am _so_ sorry. This whole trip was my idea, just so we could get to know you better, and instead you wound up in the hospital. You could have—” She cut her thought short, turning her head away.

Dean sighed and shifted his upper body as well as he could so he could face her more directly. “You didn’t shove a spider into my tent,” he said. “There are bugs in the woods. Not like you needed to tell me so. If anything, I’m the dumba—uh, dumb _person_ who didn’t say anything to anyone about how crappy I was feeling until I was laid out on the ground. Claire had to tell me I had a fever before I considered it myself.”

“Do we really need to place blame here?” Jimmy interjected. “I mean, other than on the actual spider? Who, I might add, was just doing what spiders do, so maybe even he deserves some slack. This whole thing was just a big mess of unfortunate bad luck.”

“I made it worse than it had to be, though,” Dean insisted. He held up his hand when the others tried to object, speaking over each other. “No, I mean it. It wasn’t just…I know I wasn’t thinking entirely straight, with the fever and crap, but that’s no excuse for not giving Cas the benefit of the doubt when he tried to tell me it wasn’t a grand idea to go off alone when I was visibly, obviously, in bad shape. That was just stupid.”

Castiel, narrowing his eyes, laid a finger across Dean’s lips. “Knock that off. House rules,” he reminded Dean. He was far too conscientious about keeping Dean’s private life private to mention out loud Dr. Bradbury’s embargo on negative self-talk, but the message was delivered clearly. “In retrospect, our argument was actually a major red flag, and if I hadn’t been so caught off-guard by it, I might have seen more clearly just how out of character it was.”

“Hey, maybe it was my fault,” Jimmy said, throwing up his hands. “If I’d checked Claire’s shoes before the trip, nobody would have been talking about going back to camp in the first place! Or, and here’s a thought, let’s just all agree that we’re glad Dean’s going to be fine, and also that our next big family trip is going to be on a cruise or something, where the biggest danger will be overindulgence at the buffet.”

“Or angry seagulls,” Castiel added, smiling slightly.

“Just not one of those cruises run by a certain company fronted by a mouse,” Amelia said, tilting her head toward Claire. “I can only handle so much, you know.”

The weight of the conversation eased after that, and as the afternoon rolled on, Castiel ordered a few pizzas for them to share, using one of the gift cards the office staff had sent them while Dean was hospitalized. “I have to say, it’s been amazing to see how supportive and caring everyone has been during this,” Castiel said after hanging up the phone. “Ellen Harvelle, from the Roadhouse, brought over three different casseroles, and Dean’s boss arranged for a grocery delivery to the house the day Dean was discharged. It’s made things much easier.”

“Wonder what it’ll be like when you have a pup,” Amelia said with a smirk. “It sounds like you’ll have a lot of extra hands, which is definitely something you’ll be grateful for.”

Dean glanced at Claire once more. She’d settled on the floor next to him, still refusing to move from his side, and she was quietly drawing another picture. “After all that, I think I need a good long while before I can think about pups,” he admitted. “As afraid as I was for myself, I was more scared for her. You gotta know, I’d never have forgiven myself if something had happened.”

“Welcome to my life, pretty much on a daily basis,” Jimmy said, shaking his head and smiling ruefully. “You take a close look at Cas’s hair, then mine, and you’ll see I’ve got way more grey starting to show up in places. It’s worth it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Every night, it’s like, ‘Well, I managed to keep her breathing another day.’”

“Not always against such dramatic situations, admittedly,” Amelia said, “But ask him about the time he was fixing the roof, and suddenly he heard a little voice from behind him, because Claire had followed him up the ladder.”

Jimmy gestured toward the hair above his left temple. “As I was saying,” he sighed, and they all laughed.

* * *

Later that night, Castiel had Dean laid out on his stomach on the bed so that he could gently apply the prescribed ointment to Dean’s thigh before rewrapping it. Dean closed his eyes, distracting himself from the process. It didn’t hurt much anymore, per se, but it definitely felt strange, and he didn’t like thinking about it. “Still feel dumb,” he mumbled into his arm. “I’m not supposed to think like that, but I should have known better. I had just told Amelia the day before, when we were at the lake, about how you’re so not the overprotective type. Then I went and assumed the exact opposite, when all you were trying to do was express legit concerns.”

“Stop apologizing,” Castiel said, dropping a kiss on the small of Dean’s back. “You stop castigating yourself over how you thought and behaved when you were delirious with fever, and I’ll make sure to remind myself, for any future illnesses of yours, that you hate the idea of being coddled.”

Dean pursed his lips a little. “Well,” he said, “maybe a _little_ coddling. I mean, I did almost die.”

He felt the puff of warm air against his back as Castiel huffed a small laugh. “You were indeed quite ill,” he said. “Is there anything I could do to make you feel better? Please don’t ask for pie, though, because we finished the last pieces of the peach pie with dinner.”

“Nah, I’m good on that front,” Dean grinned. “Just…do you realize it’s been a week since we last…” Not that they’d been entirely celibate; it was just that there didn’t seem to be any good knotting positions that didn’t either put pressure on or painfully stretch the back of Dean’s leg. 

Castiel crawled up beside Dean, helping him to roll over onto his side and nestle back gently into the curl of his arms. “As much as I may miss having you in that way, I’m simply too grateful to have you in _this_ way—” he tightened his embrace, kissing the back of Dean’s neck—”to be anything but content.”

“Yeah, me too.” Dean trailed his fingers along Castiel’s arm as drowsiness began tugging his eyelids downward. “Just sayin’.”

“And anyway, you have an appointment at the wound clinic in two days. Perhaps we’ll be given good news that we can…celebrate.”

“Hell, yeah.” Letting his eyes fall shut, Dean drifted off into blissful, completely nightmare-free, sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed it! Come find me on my [Tumblr](http://carrieosity.tumblr.com) if you want to talk more about it!


End file.
